Opening speech at the ITU-T/ATIS NGN workshop Las Vegas, USA, 19 March 2006 H. Zhao Director, TSB Ms. Susan Miller, President and CEO of ATIS Ladies and Gentlemen, Good morning. I am very pleased to be here with you this morning to help open this workshop on NGN. I would like to express my sincere thanks to Ms. Susan Miller for her support and agreement to organize this workshop jointly by ATIS and ITU-T. Indeed, I believe that we are all grateful for her kind invitation. In the recent years, operators from around the globe have begun implementing NGN strategies and they will invest billions of dollars in the rollout of new Internet Protocol (IP) based networks. The operators, systems vendors and government members of ITU-T believe that international standards will facilitate a global market for systems, lowering costs and providing global interoperability. They suggested and pushed ITU-T to take measures to ensure that the first global NGN standards would be produced in time to meet the operators’ requirements. To answer this urgent request of our members, the ITU-T Focus Group on NGN (FGNGN) was set up in the Spring of 2004 to strengthen and focus the ITU-T studies already being carried out by the Joint Rapporteur Group on NGN that had been in operation since the previous year. The JRG itself was part of the evolving work undertaken by multiple Study Groups even earlier. Since the creation of FGNGN there were intensive meetings, almost every two months. We saw strong growth in participation and in the number of contributions, so that by mid-November 2005, the next phase in this aggressive programme could be energized as the FGNGN handed off its deliverables to the ITU-T study groups, where the work continues to be managed as a coherent programme under the name of the “NGN-Global Standards Initiative (NGN-GSI)”. ITU-T quickly organized the next NGN working meeting, which was announced as the first NGN-GSI event. Experts from various ITU-T Study Groups met at the same place and time in January 2006, holding many individual and joint meetings to progress the work. The next NGN-GSI event will be held in Kobe, Japan, in April, and the third one will be held in Geneva in July. Through the Joint Rapporteur Groups, the NGN Focus Group and the NGN-GSI, the ITU-T Study Groups have created a continuous flow of work to realize the goals demanded by our members – many of whom are also ATIS members. I am very pleased with the progress and the results achieved. You are cordially invited to join in the on-going work of the NGN-GSI. I recall a statement by the industry leaders in 2001 that “There was a consensus that after the WTSA-2000, the ITU-T procedures are now very streamlined and efficient”. The success of the FGNGN provides an excellent example of how the ITU can be very open, very dynamic, very transparent, very quick to act and react, and among many other benefits, very low-cost for the industry and other members to work on global ICT standards. Now I am proud to present here the group’s achievements “ITU-T NGN FG Proceedings, Parts I and II, 2005”, which include the deliverables agreed by the FGNGN, together with background information on the creation of the FGNGN and information on -2- the future direction of NGN work in ITU-T. I have a free CD for each participant. This special print copy, and the only copy I bring to Las Vegas, is my gift to Susan Miller. Today, no one group can be successful only through its own efforts. There is no doubt that the success of the ITU-T work on NGN is contributed and supported by its members, and, just as importantly, the contributions and support of other standards organizations should also be recognized. ATIS is one of them. ATIS is a technical planning and standards development organization that is wellknown and well-respected throughout the telecom world. It has participants from more than 350 communications companies who are active in ATIS’ 23 industry committees and Incubator Solutions Program. The ATIS achievements are widely appreciated both inside and outside the United States. I would like to congratulate the strong leadership of ATIS and the ATIS members for their successes. ITU has enjoyed a good cooperation with ATIS for many years, through multilateral platforms such as Global Standards Collaboration and 3GPP, and through bilateral cooperation such as the ATIS partnership with ITU-T under ITU-T Recommendations A.5 and A.6 as well as this workshop. We have also enjoyed cooperation by the effective contributions and collaboration from our common members. I am pleased that ATIS is applying to become a full Sector Members of ITU-T. ITU is looking forward to strengthening our cooperation with ATIS, which will bring fruitful benefits to both organizations and to their members. This workshop will • • • Examine the status of the work in both organizations, Identify standards work needed to support ongoing viable businesses for all parties as NGN becomes reality, and Enhance and extend ITU-T and ATIS cooperation to further coordinate regional and global NGN standardization. A particular emphasis of the workshop will be NGN requirements and standards objectives from a North American perspective and the relationship of these with the global standardization work of the ITU-T. I would like to take this opportunity to express my sincere thanks to the Chair and the members of the steering committee, the chairs and moderators of sessions and speakers. I thank the staff from both ATIS and TSB for their excellent cooperation and hard work to bring this workshop to reality. I would also like to express my thanks to the industry members, AT&T, Cisco Systems and Nortel for their financial contributions to support this event. Last but more importantly, I would like to thank Susan Miller once again for her excellent spirit to jointly organize this workshop on NGN and her strong leadership to provide all the arrangements needed for this workshop. I wish you all a successful meeting. Thank you